FACT CHECK: Is this President Putin walking alone on the street after attending Wagner Chief’s funeral?

CLAIM: Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin chose to walk alone after attending the funeral of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russian Wagner group who died in a plane crash.

VERDICT: Misleading!

FULL TEXT

An X user @ehimaggie, on Tuesday, posted a video of Putin at a funeral ceremony. As seen in the video, after the funeral, he refused to enter his Limousine and chose to walk alone, while his security aides struggled to keep up with him.

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According to the poster, Putin attended the funeral of Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin who died in a plane crash. The Wagner group is a private military company with mercenaries that fight for Russia in Ukraine and also present in Central African Republic, Syria and some other countries that are unstable.

According to Russian authorities, Prigozhin and nine other passengers died when a private plane flying between Moscow and St Petersburg crashed in the Tver region, north of Moscow on 23 August.

He was buried in a private cemetery on Tuesday, August 29.

The X user wrote: “Vladimir Putin pays his last respects to Yevgeny Prigozhin the Wagner Boss and then declines to get into his Limousine and walks on foot from the occasion.”

Me: what if truly he didn’t kill the Wagner boss?🤔🤔

This video is funny sha🤣🤣🤣 Oga say “abeg make i trek..it is safer!”

VERIFICATION

Ripples Nigeria did a reverse image search of the screenshots from the video and found that it is an old video. While the video is real, it actually went viral on the internet in 2013. The funeral wasn’t the Wagner Chief’s, it was the funeral of President Putin’s childhood mentor and judo trainer, Anatoly Rakhlin in Saint Petersburg in 2013.

The original video was published in a report by Sky News in which Putin’s decision to walk alone after the funeral was described as “a public show of emotion…”

Also, media reports confirm that Putin was absent at Prigozhin’s funeral.

CONCLUSION

The claim attached to the video of Putin walking alone on the street is misleading. He did not attend the funeral of the Wagner Chief.

By Oluwatobi Odeyinka

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